“My Framework for Success”
These days, the world of IT has become not only mainstream, but also an unusually fertile stomping ground for salesmanship and marketing hype for new “frameworks”, “methodologies”, and “paradigms”, each engineered to extract more and more dollars out of the business coffers, without necessarily providing any tangible benefit to the business bottom line.
Vendors will fall all over themselves to offer you “educational credits” to ensure that your employees know each and every feature of their latest “Global Enterprise Solution” – and have cleverly figured out how to charge you back for doing so, maintaining everyone’s “certification-level”, as a way of providing themselves a continuing revenue stream in the event that the marketplace rejects their latest offering. Like everyone else they need stay alive for yet “another major feature release” of their flagship product.
I try not to be absorbed into foolishness of the IT industry’s hyperbole, because it supports the premise that your familiarity with a particular product or technology, or the adoption of a particular framework, methodology, or paradigm will be the determining factor of whether you will deliver a timely “solution” to a business problem, or alternatively, that it, will somehow allow you to avoid responding to ever-present market pressures later.
In all likelihood, it will not.
Twenty-five years worth of experience has shown me that this premise is, simply, not the case. Technology is increasingly pliable, configurable, and flexible – features and capabilities are always in flux, and being added to by the producers of such things. Abstractions come and go. Frameworks are created and destroyed.
Success however, is, very much, rooted in the “practical” and opportunity in the “immediate”.
This is not to deny the importance of understanding that establishing the proper context or organization is important to a company’s long-term viability or that the “big picture” needs to be communicated throughout the organization at critical moments or represented in its “core-values”. To think otherwise would avoid acknowledging that human beings, generally, respond slowly, even at times, poorly, to change. But, the adoption of a new technology or approach can only alleviate a very small portion of those issues within any specific period of time.
Most real-world “solutions” (I mean, the real ones, not the often “pitched” amalgamations of hardware, software, and services purported to be so by vendors, or service providers) require “overcoming” limitations in people, process, and technology, in time to take advantage of an opportunity-at-hand – in a rapid response to circumstances which are very likely to change.
Like everything else in life, the “devil is in the darn details”, and today, the details largely involve, simply put, the ability to get something done.
That means, rolling-up your sleeves and getting into the guts of the problem, if need be, and then implementing the best, and most expedient solution with the technology at hand”, with the constituency that’s already in agreement, and within the budget that you have, now – Rather than proposing some grand “paradigm-shifting” scheme which will “loom large” in the conference room, but whose practical value will never see the light of day.
The typical “top-heavy” approach fails to recognize the fundamental truth, that the tools “at-hand” if properly applied, and the people you have, if properly tasked, will more often than not, produce a very high percentage of the desired positive “business effect” without instituting a “fundamental” re-thinking, or re-organization of the business at each and every level of the company that would otherwise be effected by the alternate, transformational approach.
At most times, the practical solution, is the better solution, not only because it is significantly less expensive, but because its expedience responds to the circumstances that are immediately present – Not to those that may, in fact, never appear.
When I am tasked with a problem, I make a concerted effort to actively participate in the vision of my employer, and work hard to understand exactly what I can do to make that vision a reality, on time and within budget.
I try to stay focused on the objective, to not overly embelish its scope, and to use my extensive expertise to ensure that the “technology” or “proposed solution”, whatever it might be, will fulfill as much the objective, as possible within the time-frame for which it is business and marketplace relevant.
More often than not, the forward momentum, will itself will transform the organization in a positive manner.
The bottom-line is that frameworks, methodologies, and paradigms, should never get in the way of customers, growth, and profits.